Heartland and Hypocrisy; Gleick And The Real Climate Debate

Steve Zwick
, ContributorI write about the economic value of nature's services.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Noted hydroclimatologist and author Peter Gleick has spent his adult life measuring the impact of climate change on water resources. Last night, he took one for us all when he put his career in jeopardy by revealing that it was he who acquired and leaked documents to DeSmogBlog and others showing how the Heartland Institute – one of the loudest voices in the climate-change-denial choir – gets and spends its money.

In so doing, he delivered a massive body blow to the denialsphere and moved the world closer to finding a solution to the climate-change challenge. That's because his find exposes yet another piece of the denial machine that has been assembled over the past two decades to discredit legitimate climate science. It renders their utterances irrelevant, and provides yet more evidence that Heartland's activities aren't those of a charity, but of a PR agency acting on behalf of a few deep-pocketed paymasters who stand to lose if the world acts to mitigate climate change.

Heartland responded first with holier-than-though threats against the media for posting the memos:

“It was an outrageous violation of ethics and the law,” wrote Heartland president Joseph Bast, in an e-mail threatening legal action against media outlets that make the documents available for download. “It doesn't matter what you believe about climate change, or if you are a liberal or a conservative. You ought to understand and denounce this unethical behavior.”

It then attacked Gleick:

“Gleick's crime was a serious one,” wrote spokesperson Jim Lakely in an e-mail to reporters this morning. “The documents he admits stealing contained personal information about Heartland staff members, donors, and allies, the release of which has violated their privacy and endangered their personal safety… A mere apology is not enough to undo the damage.”

This comes after Heartland also threatened to launch an investigation into a retired US Air Force Colonel Gary Wamsley who, in a private e-mail to Bast, criticized Heartland’s efforts to fund climate denial in the schools.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the Colonel wrote. “The United States already has a problem in keeping up with the rest of the world in science education, and now you want to play a role in further destroying our nation as well as our planet. You are a traitor to your own country. I did not spend 30 years in the military to protect the likes of you.”

Bast responded by attacking the allegedly-forged memo – as if that were the only smoking gun in this nasty affair, which it isn't – or as if it really were an obvious forgery – which it also isn't. He ignored all of the other memos, and then tried to scare the retired Colonel, who responded by posting the entire exchange on his web site.

“Since your letter is threatening, I’ve forwarded it to our legal counsel, forensics team, and the FBI,” wrote Bast. “It is important that you not delete the email from your sent file, or any other emails you may have exchanged with other people while preparing it, since this could be evidence in criminal and civil cases.”

If Heartland were an innocent victim in all of this – if it were, say, a climate scientist who found his mails hacked and his character attacked just because his findings weren't the ones certain industries wanted to hear – well, we could understand the vitriol. But this isn't an innocent scientist or even anything resembling a research organization. It's a group that cheered and jeered back in 2009, and again in 2011, after an e-mail server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was hacked, and the mails were twisted and distorted to look like something they never really were.

Let’s examine these two incidents side-by-side, and the science that each purports to represent.